What is visual literacy? Literacy means you can read. Visual literacy means that you are able to read images – to understand the stories that these images are telling. Can you read graphs that show how many learners’ English marks have improved? Can you read bus timetables? Can you get the jokes in the daily cartoons in the newspapers? All of these tasks require visual literacy.

Basic visual literacy are signs that can be easy to read, for example a picture of someone swimming with a line across it means that you are not allowed to swim. But, just as some texts are easier to read than others, so visual images can also be more challenging. Political cartoons, for example, often require a whole lot of subject knowledge, as they are commenting on the issues of the day. The cartoonist is relying on you knowing what is happening in the world, and bringing that understanding to their cartoon.

Advertisers use images all the time, as we are drawn to pictures and colours. Advertisers study all sorts of things about images: for example, advertisers say that blue is a calming colour, and suggests reliability and honesty. Green is associated with nature, and so many products that want to emphasise how natural and healthy they are will use green.

Photographers and filmers are also expert in their visual techniques – a picture is not just a picture. Just the decision to take a picture from a certain angle influences how we look at it. If there is a person in a field, a photograph or film taken from high above them can make them look small and powerless. And a camera from below can make them look bigger than their environment.

Because pictures and images are so much part of modern culture, the school curriculum includes ‘visual literacy’ as part of the language curriculum, to help you develop your ‘reading’ of the images you see. It is very important for young people to be able to read both text and pictures with a critical eye, especially as we are bombarded by images from advertisers, and other people, who are wanting to influence us in some way.

So keep your eyes open, and think about not only what the stories these images are telling you, but also who made the image, and why.